Biography
Alexandra Kieffer is an Associate Professor of Musicology at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. Her first book, Debussy’s Critics: Sound, Affect, and the Experience of Modernism, published by Oxford University Press, explores ideas about sensation, listening, and emotion in early twentieth-century Debussy reception in the context of emerging scientific discourse on psychology and the senses. Her work on Debussy, Ravel, and early twentieth-century French musical culture has also appeared in 19th-Century Music, Music Theory Spectrum, The Journal of Musicology, the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and Ethnomusicology, as well as several edited collections that have appeared from Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the University of Chicago Press, and the University of Pennsylvania Press. Her current book-in-progress, Enchanting Song: Episodes from a History of Music, Magic, and Religion, traces a longue-durée intellectual history of music and religion from Plato to early twentieth-century French social science. Her scholarship has been supported by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, the American Musicological Society’s M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet fund, and the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation. Before arriving at Rice University, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford University.